Ship Builder The Last Leviathan Docks At Early Access

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Let’s be clear: the above header image is a stock photo and is not my own ship-crafting handiwork. You see, Super Punk Games’ The Last Leviathan [official site] bills itself as a “physics-based ship building and destruction adventure” and it seems I very much forgot to consider the former. I spent the best part of half an hour designing what I thought was a robust and threatening sea faring vessel with cannons and spikes and flamethrowers and when I finally tossed it into the water it immediately upturned and exploded shortly thereafter. Curse you buoyancy (or lack thereof)!

Anyway, The Last Leviathan is sort-of like genre similar Besiege and has just landed on Early Access. Here’s April’s Greenlight trailer that showcases boats far superior to mine:

In its current guise, The Last Leviathan offers four different modes to choose from: Creative, which is a non-hostile open sandbox to muck around in, trial new ship designs, and get to grips with the game’s physics engine; Battle Seas, which at the moment lets you take on a series of pirate battles of increasing difficulty, and will later let you partake in racing events, dock sieges and survival bouts; Versus, which has you go head-to-head with ships you’ve built by yourself or ones others have designed via Steam Workshop; and Events, which currently tasks you with defeating the Storm Ranger vessel with a Carrick Class ship in the fastest time possible, and will offer new challenges over time.

Voyage mode is also coming soon which will let you “build, sail, navigate and fight across the seas, unveiling the secrets of Middenhir in a voyage of survival and discovery.”

Although this is Super Punk’s first fully in-house created game, their back catalogue includes work on the Steam Edition of Microsoft Flight Simulator X, so it’s little wonder why The Last Leviathan pays such close attention to credible physics. In turn, it’s little wonder why I’m still finding my seas legs. And arms, and head, given how many times these blasted hostile pirates have blown my ship to pieces.

Yeah it seems like they’ve borrowed a lot of the design from From the Depths, although perhaps it’s just concidence and it’s been in development for a while.

If it gives From the Depths dev the hurry up in terms of getting that fantasy stuff implemented, that would be nice – at this point I don’t really see a reason to buy yet another sandbox ship building game, especially since From the Depths does a lot of things right, is fun and has combat and base building as well.

Yeah but the game uses blocks to model damage currently, organic parts wouldn’t fit into that block structure (and if it’s just because they move and deform all the time) so a new damage system is needed to model that. I hope it’s not just one long HP bar for the whole monster or large limbs, that would run counter to the weapon system that’s a lot about armor layer interaction and penetration vs. area damage.

Or to be less abstract: You can build a gun that can punch clean through a battleship (railgun, particle beam, whatever you choose) but one thin hole through a battleship usually doesn’t do much, if you stick explosives on there it has a bigger chance of destroying something valuable under the armor but a pure explosive shell would just fizzle on the armor. So you build things with AP and HE components, weighing one against the other, using different fuses in the hope of detonating the payload in the middle of the soft, technical bits instead of the armor plates. With just a single HP bar for a large chunk you could just slam a high damage penetrating shell into it to get high raw damage without worrying about the bulk of the damage flying out of the other side of the target.

Sounds like it’s aiming to be the minecraft to From The Depths’ dwarf fortress. If it does things right it’ll probably be worth a good few dozen hours of entertainment, but I’m personally gonna give it a few more months in early access.